the no-fly zone, he should know exactly what was down there, particularly if it could pose a problem for his own squadrons of interceptors.
He watched the radar scope and considered his options.
When could he legitimately claim that he’d tried to turn back the aircraft? By leaving the decision of when to fire up to him, the GCI officer was effectively transferring responsibility for the engagement to the pilot.
The Soviet-trained GCI controllers were not noted for their boldness in combat. Nor were they often willing to disturb their superiors for direct orders. They walked a fine line between maintaining tight control over their assigned intercept aircraft and doing everything possible they could to avoid responsibility for anything that happened.
Well, this time they’d made a mistake, as far as he was concerned. His orders from the GCI required him to keep the contact away from Cuba.
Even if a later tribunal decided that the attack was not authorized, he could be relatively certain that the blame would be fixed on the GCI officer rather than on him. He reached out and touched the small recorder he’d taped to the instrument panel, glad he’d begun taking the precaution of recording the transmissions on his own.
A little closer this time. He eased the Fulcrum to the right, instantaneously calculating the intercept angle and the relative airspeeds of the two aircraft. This pass, and then he gasped as the contact suddenly accelerated on the screen, then twisted the Fulcrum into a hard, braking turn. Too late.
Santana had two seconds to wonder just how the other aircraft had managed to eke out another fifty knots of airspeed and make one frantic grab at the ejection seat handle. Before the fifty-six-foot Fulcrum could even begin to twist its thirty thousand pounds of mass through the turn, the Fulcrum slammed into the smaller aircraft. The fireball blotted out the full moon’s light.
“What the where the hell did they go?” The TAO’s voice ratcheted two notes higher. He turned to the CDC watch officer. “Get your ass back to Tracker Alley find out what the hell is going on here.”
The CDC officer bolted out of his seat and trotted toward the two parallel rows of consoles. The TAO turned back to the large-screen display. Two seconds earlier he’d held hard paint on both the Fulcrum and the civilian aircraft. Now the screen showed empty airspace.
The surface of the ocean slammed into Santana like a brick wall. The force drove the air out of his lungs. He sucked in a breath reflexively, then erupted into choking and spasmodic retching as seawater coursed down into his lungs.
He twisted his head back and stared up at the surface so far above.
Five seconds later, the automatically inflating life preserver did its job. Santana bobbed up to the surface, coughing, sputtering, and gagging. Warm night air poured into his lungs like a blessing.
Burning debris from the mishap spattered the ocean around him. A large chunk hit near him, floated for a few seconds trying to scorch the water, then sank with a burbling swirl of bubbles. Santana gasped, finally able to concentrate on something besides his own desperate need for oxygen.
He fumbled with the pocket on his flight suit and drew out his portable air distress radio. Ten seconds later, he was talking almost calmly to the sea-air rescue station ashore.
GCI had already passed them his last location, and the watch officer assured him that a helo was launching at that moment for his location.
Santana let the radio slip out of his fingers, leaned back in the warm water with the life jacket buoying him up, and waited.
There was no doubt in his mind now as to the identity of the other aircraft. No smuggler would have been so careless.
The Americans would pay for this. He would make certain of it.
TWO
“This better be good.” The noise level inside TFCC dropped immediately as Rear Admiral Edward Everett “Batman” Wayne strode into the small compartment.
The Flag TAO, still wearing his modular headset, stood up and turned to the admiral. “Admiral, approximately fifteen minutes ago, a Cuban MiG-29 apparently downed a civilian aircraft forty miles north of Cuba.
The contact was inbound at one hundred and thirty-five knots, no IFF, no Mode 4. We designated it as a contact of interest and maintained a watch on it, pending a change of course toward the battle group.”
“Shit,” Batman said softly. “Did we interrogate the contact on International Air Distress?”
The TAO nodded. “No response. And no distress call now 1-on either civilian air distress or military air distress.”
Batman rubbed his hands over his face, then scratched absentmindedly under his left arm. The flight suit he’d slipped on as he crawled out of his rack naked was still new, and the stiff fabric chafed. “Is anybody saying anything?”
He jerked his thumb at the right bulkhead. “What about the spooks?”
“That would be me,” a short, blond-haired, blue-eyed officer said as he stepped through the hatch leading into TFCC. “There was a brief, encrypted transmission from GCI, probably to the Fulcrum, immediately prior. Admiral.”
Commander Hillman Busby, known as Lab Rat to the other intelligence officers, shrugged. “Not unusual. They keep their land-based air patrols under close control. We knew the MiG was there, of course, but there were no indications of hostile activity.”
“Did the MiG take a shot at it?” the admiral asked. “A small contact like that, maybe he’s just too low and dropped off our radar.”
Lab Rat shook his head. “We can’t tell. Immediately before the contact disappeared off radar, we were holding targeting transmissions from the MiG, but there was no contact on an actual missile launch.
They both just dropped off the screen.”
Batman suppressed a yawn. “Any indications where the aircraft launched from?”
“The track seems to correlate with a civilian aircraft launched out of Miami forty-five minutes before. No flight plan, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s entirely possible that he launched from a private airfield. That, or the paperwork just got mixed up. The Coast Guard is checking on it now.”
“Has SOUTHCOM been notified?” the admiral asked.
The TAO spoke up. “Voice report five minutes ago, and the message is almost ready to fly.” He held out a single sheet of paper. “Any comments to add. Admiral?”
Admiral Wayne studied the message, then shook his head “No, we don’t know anything at this point. Just what the message says.” He scribbled his initials in the upper right corner of the paper. “Go ahead and send it.”
The admiral climbed up into the high-backed, elevated leatherette seat located in the middle of TFCC, his thoughts hundreds of miles away from the carrier. Ashore, the watch staff would soon be waking the SOUTHCOM admiral, just as Batman’s staff had awakened him. He grinned, wondering if his old running mate. Admiral Matthew Tombstone” Magruder, would like it any better than he had.
Tombstone and Batman had spent practically every tour in the Navy together on one carrier or another. Together they’d seen most of the nastiness the world had to offer, fighting wingtip to wingtip. First, as junior nugget aviators, they’d chased MiGs in all parts of the world ranging from; Norway to the South China Sea. Later, as more senior officers, they’d fallen into a now predictable pattern. Tombstone, two years senior to Batman, blazed the trail, For his last two tours, Batman had relieved Tombstone in his billet while Tombstone went on to scout their
